Monthly Archives: October 2014

I must be doing something right, because I now know two Zens! ZenPundit is a terrific historian and author. ZenOfDesign, a game designer, is also the most polished of the voices defending GawkerMedia and Vox in the gamergate scandal.

ZenOfDesign and I agree that sites like Gawker and Vox at least aspire to be journalists.

ZenOfDesign confuses commentary with journalism. For instance he explicitly compares Gawker with Daily Kos, apparently without realizing that Daily Kos is a site dedicated to commentary and political agitation.

ZenOfDesign confuses entertainment with journalism. For instance, he appears to be honestly disturbed that celebrity “streamers” engage in product placement (he’s not alone in this — a famous celebrity streamer well known for his gentle personality was also very worried).

Very few care about celebrity product placement for the same reason very few care about Daily Kos’ liberal bias: neither celebrities nor political agitators are journalists.

Many times I’ve mentioned that the #gamergate scandal was fueled by a naive population that believed game journalists were had the prestige or access of, say, Washington Post reporters. ZenOfDesign is striking for me in that he is a supporter of Vox and Gawker, but equally naive. His passion against celebrity product placement is heartfelt, and his demand to know how product placement is made is earnest.

Look, if I were a #gamergater and cared about actual journalistic integrity in games as much as they purport to, I’d at least demand some answers. I’d be aiming the angry mob at demanding confirmation of these requirements. I’d be trying to find out what OTHER games this particular marketing company shilled for and looking at those. I’d be taking a hard look at early YouTube videos and seeing who made videos that matched these requirements, and try to figure out which YouTube video personalities are basically purely on the take. I’d be pushing personalities to establish disclosure rules for financial rewards and editorial content restrictions such as this.

To anyone who understands that entertainment is not journalism, however, it’s also bizarre

Meanwhile, in game news publishing, this form of censorship has been observed. Early on in the #gamergate scandal, reddit began censoring discussion of collusion between Vox Media, Gawker Media, and game developers. This lead to the discussion to shift to twitter, a rival platform.

If Amazon achieves a monopoly in “indie author” book publishing, they would have wholesale transfer pricing power, be able to strip all economic profits from indie authors, and censor indie authors at will.

If Reddit would achieve a monopoly in “gamer” news publishing, they would have wholesale transfer pricing power, be able to strip all economic profits from indie authors, and censor gamers will.

The only difference is that this shift from command-and-control to user-generated publishing is more advanced in game news than it is in books.

There are three (and maybe four) important kinds of publishing platforms

Consumer-produced, consumer-side no economies of scaleMost published content is produced by users of the service. Each additional consumer/producer does not increase the utility of the service for other users (in ways not related to producer economies of scale)
Examples: WordPress

Consumer-produced, consumer-side economies-of-scaleMost published content is produced by users of the service. Each additional consumer/producer increases the utility of the service for other users (in ways not related to producer economies of scale)
Examples: infiniteChan, Facebook, Reddit, Tumblr, Twitch, YouTube

Employee-produced, no consumer-side economies of scaleMost published content is produced by paid employees or contractors. Each additional consumer/producer does not increase the utility of the service for other users (in ways not related to producer economies of scale)
Example: The Washington Post

Employee-produced, consumer-side economies of scaleMost published content is produced by paid employees or contractors. Each additional consumer/producer does not increase the utility of the service for other users (in ways not related to producer economies of scale)
Example: This may not exist in a pure form. But a pretty close example is Amazon Kindle, where the bulk of the material is created by paid authors, while reviews and annotations are shared between consumers.

Interestingly, Amazon.com is involved in three of these platforms. Amazon owns Twitch, Kindle, and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post.

Just as interesting is the predictable way besieged “traditional media” (employee produced, and without economies of scale) attacks “new” media with consumer-side economies-of-scale. For example, the Washington Post employs Caitlin Dewey, whose only responsibility appears to be targetting media that has consumer-side economies-of-scale. Recent targets include

The Gamergate scandal is interesitng, not just because of the media firestorm, but because it predicts future firestorms.

The Gamergate pattern occured first in games journalism, given the high technical skill of many readers. But it will to other forms of publishing.

The basic pattern is as follows

1. Self-publishing platforms decrease profit of traditional publishing outlets
2. Traditional publishing outlets respond by decreases wages (and thus skill) of editors and reporters
3. Decreased attractiveness of traditional oulets because of low skill (#2) increase the draw of self-publishing platforms, giving them consumer-side economies of scale
4. At some time, traditional outlets consider an “outrage” (some behavior interpretted as both incompetent and hostlie) because of the low skill of their editors and writers (#2)
5. A significant fraction of the most engaged consumers mobile on self-publishing platforms (#3) because of the outrage (#4)

This is the pattern of the gamergate scandal.

We’ve also seen a pattern in how journalists have circled the wagons, but that is a post for another time

Gamergate is a scandal, not a movement. The gamergate scandal is a sign of a publishing industry in crisis. The scattered demands of those who talk about gamergate are irrelevent, because it’s not a political or even social campaign. The gamergate scandal goes away either when game journalism once again becomes a skilled profession, or when the digg-like exodus from dying old game outlets concludes.

Gamergate is a scandal which outrages a community because it combines collusion between journalists (like the secret GameJounroPros” mailing list) with collusion between journalists and the industry they cover (including sex-for-favors, and even commissioning works to review).

But I’m more cynical than I was when I started this blog. If gamergate was just a scandal of corrupt journalists fucking their subjects and working together to cover that up, I probably would be bored.

But it’s not just corruption, which is normal, but actual incompetence, which is rare. When caught, a normally intelligent corrupt figure will apologize, pretend to make amends, and wait for things to die down before being corrupt again.

Gamergate ends when the habit of gamers to care about what “game journalists” say ends. This could end by kotatku, gamastura, and other websites changing their mind and deciding they don’t want gamers to be “over.” But more likely: the gamergate scandal ends when gamers realize that their voice is as important as a theatre-major in Brooklyn, or a hipster in San Francisco. The gamergate scandal ends when black gamers, white gamers, asian gamers, gay gamers, straight gamers realize the one thing they share — love of being gamers — is the one thing that game journalists despise.

Gamergate ends when Twitch replaces Kotatku, Youtube replaces Gamasutra, and twitter replaces Polygon. Gamergate ends when the cost of self-publishing is so low that gamers on youtube get equal access to upcoming games as game “journalists.”

The gamergate scandal shows how when a publishing industry keeps lowering wages beyond what is required to attract competent editors, the outcome is the mamarginalizationf a publishing industry and a mass defection to new media.

The scandal (journalists like some of their subjects, and fuck them) is not new to anyone familiar with human nature. But the public attacks and mockery of a magazine’s own readership may be unprecedented.

However, Kotaku still allows its writers to directly purchase a game for reviewing, or to back projects onKickstarter and Indiegogo, two other, more established platforms for people to crowdsource revenue, despite the fact that both of these transactions also involve the writer financially supporting the developer. Where Kickstarter and over-the-counter purchasing differ from Patreon, according to various writers and figureheads at Kotaku, is that through them you support the product, whereas through Patreon you support the person.

Imagine if Sports Illustrated said that athletes — or football fans — where “over.” Imagine if there were football teams operating because of donations by ESPN columnists.

Imagine if ESPN said they had no obligation to look out for the interests of football fans

The gamergate scandal is the biggest news in publishing, because it shows how publishers operates after the industry can no longer pay grown-ups. Game journalists actually thought it was a good idea — in any sense — to publicly attack and mock their own readers. Game journalists actually have been creating stories — funding favorite designers — in order to give themselves something to write about.

Major book publishers like Hachette, Penguin Random House, and HarperCollins can afford to pay professional salaries to editors, because self-publishing platforms don’t have economies of scale yet. When that day passes, when you see editors at Penguin declare that “readers are over” and the New York Review of Books publishing reviews by books commissioned by the reviewers, book publishing will be as wasted as game journalism is now.

Journalism and Access

The business of journalism is built on access. And the prestige of journalism is related to the ease of access.

Areas that are the easiest to access allow journalists to be most prestigious. For instance, covering the Unitd States government is a prestigious assignment of a journalists. It’s always an “easy” on: there are so many agenda and centers of powers in the United States government that it is relatively easy to aquire access. Occasionally, this allows journalists to present themselves as hollywood heroes. An example of this is All the President’s Men, a book (and later movie!) which is about two journalists special access to an FBI bureaucrat.

Areas that are moderately difficult to access allow journalists to be moderately prestigious. For instance, the organizational behavior of large companies shares with the United States multiple centers of power and many agendas. Unlike the ggovernment almost all employees at a company share some material interest in the well-being of a company. This, journalism about organizational behavior in large companies can be most prestigious either during a scandal, or during a succession transfer. An example of this is Inside the Plex, a book that was written during current Google CEO Larry Page’s successful campaign against former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.

Areas that are the hardest to access allow journalists to be least prestigious. This is because of the monopoly power of any source that chooses to talk: they can extract concessions from the attractiveness of the reporter to a very real fear that access can be revoked if the tone of coverage becomes un-flattering. Journalists in these situations may find themselves almost indistinguishable from corporate shills

Access and Gamergate

The gamergate consumer revolt against the low-prestige game journalists is in its second month. One reason for this revolt is the disgust that journalists feel about gamers: as Vox Media’s T.C. Sottek says, that game journalists feel no obligations to look out for the interest of gamers

But even before gamergate, the feeling was mutual: gamers do not like game journalists. The most successful game outlets, whether in terms of consumer recommendations or twitter followers, are “celebrity” gamers on youtube and twitch, and not journalists who declare their core demographic dead.

So if you are a publisher of games: who would you provide access to? Low-prestige journalists that do not like gamers, do not like games, and are unpopular with gamers? Or celebrity enthusiasts who are popular with the community and care about it?

Journalism and GamerGate

The future of games coverage is in the present. For too long gaming coverage has focused on the vague future, the preview mindset of possibilities and maybes. And when it’s involved the present it has been drenched in the dreary falseness of empty interviews, bland producer-speak and executive-hype. It’s neither been real enough nor true enough to what is actually happening now. For too long games reporting has involved staring at what is opaque, maybe glimpsing something through it and reporting about that possibility, all the while ignoring so much of what is clearly visible and exciting around us. P

I believe there is a better way to cover games, one that puts future-based coverage and executive interviews in proper diminished proportion. We must focus on the games that are being played now and the human beings—the gamers, mostly—who are doing interesting things with them.

Game journalists have made their living as low-prestige journalists for decades. That’s not ending because they have a chance of being higher prestige journliasts. It’s that they’ve given up on being journalists.

GamerGate began with a sex-for-reviews microscandal concerning a free-to-play online game. It continued with coordinated editorials in which major publications asked their primary demographic to stop reading their magazines, in perhaps the most self-defeating series of op-eds in history

It is now an ethics-in-journalism movement.

Those all will pass. What comes next is the deluge.

The Economies of Scale

There are two kinds of economies of scale. One, producer-side economy of scale (just called “economies of scale” by old textbook) refers to the cost advantages of dividing a large fixed cost of capital over an even larger number of consumers. The great modern enterprises of our day — Barnes & Noble for example — were primarily based on the immense cost savings of producer side economies of scale.

But there’s another kind of economy of scale: consumer-side economies of scales. This, called “network effects” in the booming days of the .com bubble because the socialized road and postal systems had been frozen for so long as to be invisible, refer to the transactional cost savings (reduction of duplication of effort, reduction of friction, etc) of acceting a standardized communication platform. The Internet itself is an example of something with massive consumer-side economies of scale: the more consumers are on it, the easier it will be to procure goods and services on it.

Consumer-side economies of scale allowed Amazon to challenge Barnes & Noble, until it had acquired enough producer-side economies of scale to bury it.

Amazon was, and is, a company straddling the line between Modern enterprises, and whatever comes after.

The Publishing Industry

There are two ways to treat a human client. You can treat him as your customer, from whose wallet you obtain your income. Or you can treat him as your product, selling him to your actual customers. Amazon is an example of the first sort of enterprise, Google the second. Both approaches can lead to happy humans, and happy shareholders.

But not always.

Consider magazine publishing. Traditionally, magazine publishers received their income from a combination of subscription revenue of and advertising revenue. These magazines benefited from a “multi-sided market” in which they the human end-users were both the client and the product. This allowed magazines to nimbly change their pricing strategy as the situated warranted. Humans were happy. Advertisers were happy. Shareholders were happy.

And all this coincided with massive supplier-side economies of scale, and no consumder-side economies of scale except for the socialized (and static) highway and postal systems. This was the Golden Age of publishing

The introduction of new consumer-side economies of scale meant that it was really, really cheap for each marginal consumer to aquire published materials — the internet, the web, web browsers, even communication lines were there, and accepting these standards was invisible. This allowed micro-amazons, with goals of large readership bases and exploiting consumer-side economies of scale, to thrive.

Time’s cover stories were for a quant age, in which transaction costs were still high enough to exclude low-cost low-quality competitors. Instead, new competitors enjoyed the benefits of economies of scale, from both the consumer and producer sides.

The new companies (Buzzfeed, Vox, and so on) were further able to exploit the economies of scale by substituting quality of audience for quantity. Instead of dedicated readers paying $10 or $20 or $100 dollars a year, instead htey focused on “click-bait” or emotional pieces written by even worse paid writers. The advertisers got their audience, the new publishers still got money, but the core readership felt increasingly alienated.

The day of the endless “Top Ten Reasons Why You’re Addicted to Buzzfeed” had dawned.

Self-Publishing and GamerGate

Just as Amazon put fatal competitive pressure on Barnes & Noble, Buzzfeed and its ilk put fatal competitive pressure on Time-Warner. With consumer-side economies of scale taking away its moat, and producer-side economies of scale fading with declining readers, the old Modern enterprises began fading.

Two-forces kept churning: consumer-side economies of scale continued to reduce transaction costs. And the most engaged readers (those who had been most willing to pay for subscriptions, and more enthusiastic about their subject) felt increasingly alienated by the new Buzzfeed world.

In gamer-oriented commentary-and-entertainment publishing – because of the relatively young and educated nature of its target demographic — we see this post-Modern world right now. Self-publishing is more valuable than traditional (magazine-based) or hybrid (listicle-based) publishing.

The top self-publishing platform for gamers — twitch.tv — was recently purchased for Amazon.com for one billion dollars. This is ten-times more than the highest estimate I was able to find for an estimate of the entire Vox Media congolomerate (of which a very small fraciton is gaming).

And it’s not just revenue, but influence. “Steam” is the top online marketplace for video games. The top curator is a guy with a Youtube channel.

Of the top 10 curators, only 3 are magazines.

An example video from “cynical brit” is this op-ed piece, which combines footage of a computer game with commentary on Gamer Gate itself

These change are coming to other parts of the media. The recent fight between Amazon adn Hacette is just bargainin for a cut of the profits. It does’t matter. But what matters is when Amazon is able to drive the cost of reading for consumers to $0.

What happens then is what happened to gaming 15 years ago: a widespread collapse of the old publishers, a shift to an advertising model of some form, a collapse of wages, and a deprofessionalization of writers.

What happens after that? What happens when those future readers exploit even newer self-publishing platforms to cater to a nearly-forgotten core audience? What happens when book writers and journalists become as out of touch with their audience as game journalsits?